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'Big Short' investor says white-collar jobs bubble is 'bursting'
- ravedave5 4y agoRiiiiight..... just let me know when I can easily find good devs.
- ogogmad 4y agoI think he's talking about administration type jobs, or something.
- feoren 4y ago> just let me know when I can easily find good devs As a good dev looking for a job, I can tell you with 95% certainty that the good devs are not applying to your job because your company is a boring knockoff doing boring things and your job sounds like a boring dead-end where developers will be cordoned off into a little box with nary enough room to turn around while they implement mandates handed down from above by a product owner who never uses the actual product with no opportunity for actually discussing whether this new silly feature will make the product worse or not (it will) while technical debt and cruft accumulates and any attempt to invest in the long-term health of your product will result in a reprimand. After months of looking at job postings, hiring managers complaining about not finding good devs just sounds like incels complaining about not being able to date hot women. Look inward. Lots of good devs are out there looking. They're just not looking at you.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoWhat could I say to convince people that this is not the case? Like I have a small team trying to revolutionize nuclear power deployment performance with a highly customized PLM app but on paper it just seems to sound boring.
- ambicapter 4y agoHow in the blazes do you manage to make nuclear power sound boring?
- feoren 4y agoObviously I don't know your specific case, but I can offer a few ideas: > trying to revolutionize There are a lot of aspirational companies out there. I'd rather work at an aspirational company than one with no vision at all, but you still need to convince me that there's an actual chance you can deliver on this vision. If you told me you were going to revolutionize the world's energy sector with a perpetual motion machine, I'm obviously passing. Treat me like an investor -- convince me your company has a future. Because, of course, I am an investor; I'm considering investing a large percentage of my professional life in your company. > nuclear power deployment performance Nuclear power is interesting but highly regulated. If I come up with new and interesting ideas that contribute to this space, is it too tightly constrained by regulation to have any chance those ideas could get applied? Will I be in a position where anyone will actually listen to my ideas, or have you already made up your mind about how everything is going to work? Am I going to get to talk about the product development, or is this going to be handed down to me with people taking offense if I try to explain why that latest change doesn't make sense with the rest of the application? And what is "deployment performance" -- trying to cut the costs involved in building and deploying new nuclear power plants? If it is, just say that. Don't make me guess what your company actually does, because I'm going to guess using my priors, and as you probably guessed from my other comment, my priors are very negative. > a highly customized PLM app Two red flags here: "highly customized" -- I'm a software developer. I write code (among many other things, of course). What does "customized" mean? Are you building this in some other inner platform? "Customized" sounds much weaker than just plain new code. Will I find Apex code built on SharePoint or something awful like that? "Customized" is a huge red-flag word for me because it's almost exclusively used by people who are afraid of programming and don't understand the software development lifecycle. The other red flag: "app". You're trying to "revolutionize nuclear power deployment performance" with an ... app? Look, I get that "app" is just short for "application" and therefore could mean anything, including an advanced industry-centric analysis tool. But it doesn't, does it? You wouldn't use the word "app" for that. So you're trying to revolutionize nuclear power with a $2 app in the Apple Store or something? That's what it sounds like to me. Again, think of me as an investor. If that's your elevator pitch, I've come away with the message "big ideas with absolutely no idea how to deliver on them".
- kamranjon 4y agoWith an attitude like that it’s no surprise you are still looking. Let’s be honest, the good devs, with good communication and people skills, they already have jobs and their companies will do whatever they can to keep them.
- feoren 4y ago> they already have jobs and their companies will do whatever they can to keep them. I truly wish I lived in the world you imagine. I've been in the job I'm leaving for 13 years, received top-tier performance reviews every year, constant improvement, very good software, technical lead of one of the most profitable teams in the entire (huge) company. Everyone who has ever worked with me directly has great things to say. Meanwhile the vice presidents of such-and-such that play musical chairs with their titles every 2 years do not care. I have made it very clear what they need to do to keep me (and it's not onerous, in fact it's mutually beneficial for everyone and completely in line with the CEO's vision), and they do not care. I'm not sitting in the right seat; I'm not already buddies with the right VP; so fuck me. I can go get fucked. It honestly sounds like you either have no real-world experience or you've gotten extremely lucky with the company you found. If it's the latter, do whatever you can to stay there as long as it doesn't turn to shit (and it can, at any point).
- mcluck 4y agoTo be fair, I wouldn't consider someone who has been in the same company for 13 years an expert on the quality and quantity of devs on the market. Your experience within your one company is not a good indicator of the rest of the market. Most people I know jump jobs every 2-5 years going on to more and more interesting opportunities. Even at these more interesting places, the message is the same: we cannot find enough people.
- betaby 4y agoJob hoppers with 2 years stints can't have any deep domain knowledge. Neither can judge even their own code quality/robustness/usefulness - that way too short period of time.
- sage76 4y agoDefine good. What specific skills do you want? How much experience in each of those skills? I have noticed that too many times employers want literal gods to come in and fix their entire tech stack, their product, and by extension their company. Of course, they are frequently only paying average salaries.
- wonderwonder 4y agoSupply and demand. The devs are out there, most likely your salary offer is too low. What makes a dev good in your mind? How many hours a week do you expect the devs to work? Work from home? Is your salary enough to lure them from FAANG or vc backed companies? There is always a reason the devs are not coming and most of the time it has something to do with work / life balance, benefits or salary or any of the above. I dont know you, you could be the coolest boss on earth but if something is wrong with the above points then you wont find what you are looking for.
- mikkergp 4y agoI think it's fairly clear even in his example that not all white collar is created equal. I'm not sure how you'd divide it but certain professions like Doctors and developers are not in the same camp as management/accountants/lawyers. So, for the following quote from the article, who are the people actually necessary for "creating and delivering the goods and services that consumers want and need on a daily basis." "there is a massive shortage of blue collar jobs like truck drivers, hospitality and restaurant employees, and other employees necessary for actually creating and delivering the goods and services that consumers want and need on a daily basis."
- metadat 4y agoMichael Burry has been claiming the sky is falling for more than a year now. In my eyes he is no longer credible. Broken clock and all that. At this point, the entire globe has fallen in uncharted economic territory. Anyone projecting certainty about what the future holds is a fool, liar, or both.
- encoderer 4y agoMore than a decade.
- metadat 4y agoThanks for the correction; I only noticed his nonsense in my news feeds since the past year or so. He was right once a long time ago. Now he's just a charlatan continually desperately trying to capitalize on that one dusty old win.
- polski-g 4y agoMore than a year? And the stock market dropped 20% in the last year? Seems a bit credible.
- grey-area 4y agoHe’s correct. The bubble caused by a decade of easy money started to burst last year. Go look at a stock chart from the last 1Y and you’ll see that the sky has started to fall, and had been falling from just after 1Y and has a long long way to go. Until inflation is under control and fed tightening stops, housing, equities, and bonds will continue to fall in price. This week almost saw a catastrophic run on the pound and UK gilts and US bonds are flashing warning signs. The crash started last year and continues with mathematical certainty until the fed pivots.
- metadat 4y agoIs it a bubble or a crash when not accompanied by a huge wave of abrupt layoffs and / or market losses? From where I'm sitting, the current phenomena appear slow moving and unfolding over such a long period of time, it's easily observable and unsurprising. Maybe we just have a different definition of these terms?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- seydor 4y agoIsn't his job white-collar? It would be prudent for him to buy some cattle. Did he actually buy any?
- encoderer 4y agoThere is a strange cast of right-once hangers-on from a decade ago like burry that people love to quote in headlines. Nate silver is another example. Why are these people so interesting to bloggers/journalists?
- RC_ITR 4y agoIt's cover for the increasing editorialization of 'news.' Reporter wants to say something about 'I bet WFH will have negative impacts on white collar workers." Their options are: 1) Do data-driven research and come up with a dry, sort-of-compelling article about recent data releases that doesn't get traction 2) Use a 'famous for being right in a big way' celebrity to 'launder' their idea.
- rchaud 4y agoWe may live in an irreligious society, but humanity's innate desire to anoint prophets to warn us of a coming reckoning continues unabated.
- pohl 4y agoNot a Nate Silver fan, here, but I don't think the "right once" sentiment about him captures his record accurately. What really happened is that millions of people who have an underdeveloped understanding of what it means for a lower-probability event to happen in a single trial are telling on themselves whenever they refer to him as having been "wrong". I mean, if you play only one round of russian roulette — but you lose — it's not really a surprise, is it. There are only six chambers.
- bena 4y agoYeah, Silver simply tells us the odds. Someone did the analysis on it at one point and 538 was "right" at about the rate of their percentages. i.e. For all the times they called an event 65%, it happened about 65% of the time. So they weren't "wrong" the other 35% of the time, it's just those are the times the 35% chance bore out. People have a habit of assuming "is likely" is the same as "guaranteed". Or that that's what the caller believe will happen. And then using the event once passed to discredit the initial analysis.
- DeadMouseFive 4y agoReally solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry. WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve from the old "filing cabinets and typewriters" methods that some companies are still using to this day. Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps. The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore. I watch my partner's experience in accounting and the difference are stark. There are many many bs steps in accounting with paper that disappear when digital tools are used. Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required. "We've always done it this way" is an excuse for firms that will fall behind other digitally empowered firms. What does this mean for investors? Don't invest in companies that insist on using filing cabinets.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI work for an organization where all the accounting is digital, has been for decades. Yet every miscellaneous expense reimbursement requires a receipt. That physical receipt has to be submitted with an expense report. The physical receipt is then scanned when the expense report is processed, but it is also filed and has to be kept for 7 years, subject to audit. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, so it must either be a legal requirement or maybe the organization had a really bad experience with expense fraud and is now paranoid.
- djmips 4y agoLove the lack of science with regard to the throwaway line about WFH causing lower productivity.
- abawany 4y agoIt's been funny seeing the anti-WFH sentiment especially in light of Ed Zitron's (https://ez.substack.com/ https://ez.substack.com/) counter-arguments. At this point, I'm somewhat convinced that anyone in business railing against WFH either misses crushing worker ants under their thumbs or has a huge investment in commercial REITs.
- AussieWog93 4y agoI know for a fact that I was much less productive working from home. Perhaps there are others in a similar boat who've extrapolated their experience out to the general public.
- djmips 4y agoWould you care to assess why that was for you? I promise to only learn from your experience.
- streetcat1 4y agoNot correct. Boomers are retiring and with them their experience. Gen Z are much smaller than Boomers. This is a structural issue that can be fixed only via immigration. What could have been automated probably was automated. Also, due to china failures, there is going to be boom of insourcing not outsourcing.
- madcadmium 4y agoYou're saying that we've reached peak automation?
- tcbawo 4y agoI'm not disagreeing with your premise about Boomers. The youngest Baby Boomers (birth year 1946-1964) are in their late 50s, although the oldest have been retirement age for 10 years. It's likely that many had postponed retirement, but health and economic issues have forced them into retirement. On a tangential note, everybody always forgets Gen X. Or, maybe 'Boomer' has become a term for 'someone older than a young adult'?
- mutt2016 4y agoEvery single time I hear millennial I think avocado toast. And every time I hear boomer I think of strong perfume. The words meaning sure hadn't changed, but I imagine the longer its mainstream the more it will morph. Soon we won't be allowed to say it at all, lest we offend somebody with the slur.
- glouwbug 4y agoIt's a generational thing. Just like Gen-Z hates the boomers for exploiting real estate the children of Gen-Z will complain their UBI pays too little because millennials exploited massive tech salaries to automate away burger flipping joints and software development
- teeray 4y ago> health and economic issues have forced them into retirement For many too, they held on because their job was fun. My neighbor was a shipping container captain… he was eligible for retirement for many years. What finally made him retire was all the rigamarole the pandemic introduced. It stopped being fun. The same thing happened with a local family-owned Agricultural store near me that’s been around for 70-odd years. Dealing with everything in the past 2 years sucked all the joy out of running the store, so they decided to retire.
- xwdv 4y agoMaybe we should start referring to WFH jobs as virtual collar jobs or something.
- boppo1 4y agoSweatpants jobs.
- DebtDeflation 4y agoYou wear pants?
- incogitomode 4y agoEmail jobs!
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoLegacy jobs.
- seandoe 4y agoNo Collar jobs. No collar holler!
- banach 4y agoThe Bullshit Jobs bubble is bursting.
- impalallama 4y agoI've been reading headlines like this for over a decade now. I wonder when it will finally happen. Also interesting use of the word bubble considering it involves an unprecedented change in how our economy has functioned for the past 3/4 of a century. "The car dependent American suburb bubble is bursting"
- burlesona 4y agoFunny you say this because the car dependent American suburb is also showing signs of stress: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
- ProAm 4y ago> I've been reading headlines like this for over a decade now. I wonder when it will finally happen. These things happen two ways, gradually then suddenly. It is coming, but there is no need for sudden panic.
- FrontierPsych 4y ago
- xani_ 4y agoThat reads like "We wish to start paying our devs like our cleaning staff to get more profits"
- chinabot 4y agoBased on the quality of most of the recent programs and apps I have seen the cleaners could probably do a better job.
- yrgulation 4y agoProbably written using copilot or similar autocomplete tools.
- gabyar 4y agoBurry is a hedge fund manager. The most important part of his job is to scare people away from the S&P and entice them to put money into his fund. It's generally a mistake to trust the financial advice of any hedge fund manager, and they usually provide advice that makes the S&P seem like a bad bet.
- missedthecue 4y agoScion Asset Management isn't open to clients.
- echelon 4y agoThe more widely his narrative is believed, the more money he makes. He's not behaving selflessly here.
- jeffbee 4y agoThat's a vapid take. If I have information that isn't widely known, and I have established a vested position, then it is always profitable for me to promulgate my information. That doesn't suggest my information is wrong.
- lossolo 4y agoWhat if I don't have information that isn't widely known but I've people listening to me because I was once right in 2008 so now everyone is listening to what I have to say, and then I use it to influence people to do what I want based on what I say? Couldn't that be other side of the coin?
- chii 4y agoit's not information being promulgated, but speculation. Time will tell whether said speculation will turn out to be right. However, if more people believed such speculation, it might make it more likely to be right in the future. Therefore, there's a selfish reason for said person to promulgate such speculation.
- fny 4y agoI'm not afraid to say Burry is wrong. White-collar jobs will boom, but they'll be outsourced. Work from home changes nothing about labor needs only labor location. If anything, work-from-home is a net productivity negative for large, bureaucratic organizations because slacking becomes even easier.
- dangus 4y agoThis dude and this article are really not making a great case here. The last sentence of the tweet is a dead giveaway of the archaic thinking. Why is WFH going to be blamed again? It feels like it's yet another manager's plea for employees to come back to the office and get micromanaged. The article tries to answer my question: > Work from home. The work from home trend is threatening office jobs because it reduces the need for many traditional office roles like secretaries and receptionists. In what world are secretaries and receptionists a prevalent job title in the first place? Is the author of this article retired or something? The first wave of computing already shifted those roles. Executive assistants to the SLT are not just answering phones and twiddling thumbs. On top of that, in the modern world receptionists are one of the most minimally staffed parts of a company already. My last 1,000 employee in-person company had no more than two or three receptionists and they were contracted out to a vendor. You know what is expanding post-pandemic? Co-working spaces. [1] Technology and the pandemic aren't eliminating offices, they're changing them. Many employees want a separate space to work, or a place to collaborate in person, but they don't want to be forced to go in daily. Companies don't want to have to make long-term lease commitments and dedicate one seat per employee. Guess who has receptionists? Coworking spaces. But again they aren't sitting there twiddling their thumbs. WeWork and the rest of the modern coworking spaces are highly automated. You can't just ask the reception desk to fix something or make a change to your office, you have to put in a ticket. These receptionists wear many hats: they're salespeople, they set up events, they communicate with tenants, they do light cleaning. Their tasks are too varied to be replaced by an automation, and their salaries aren't that expensive. > In contrast, the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed by office professionals is now being performed by software. Automation is driving new business ventures for precisely the reasons the article brings up. Thousands of businesses exist today that couldn't possibly exist because computing wasn't powerful enough. As soon as you automate an enterprise task it opens up more opportunity to provide more complex business products and invite new ventures into the mix making products that didn't exist in the past. Being able to do more things with less money is basically always a net positive. > Furthermore, while restaurant, retail, and even factory workers are all expected to be ultimately replaced by robots that tech companies like Tesla (TSLA) are producing, this technology is even further away from being widely deployed, with some predicting these machines to not be meaningfully impactful until the end of this decade. Not 100% related to my argument, but this quote above is one of the dumbest things this article claims. Anyone who thinks that retail and hospitality workers are going to straight up be replaced by robots is delusional, especially with the timeframe of "the end of this decade." It costs something like $20/hour to hire a line cook, less in low cost of living areas. Certainly, the future of hospitality has fewer workers per customer, but that's just normal labor optimization. There won't be a fully automated McDonald's, but McDonald's employees work with a lot of automated devices. The dexterity and intelligence of a human is very difficult to replace entirely. Robots aren't going to be talking to customers at the Apple Store, the whole reason people are there is to talk to a person, and retail salaries are already quite low. And why is Tesla in this discussion? Tesla doesn't produce factory automation robots. They purchase plain jane factory robotics that have been part of the auto industry for decades. It's like the article just wanted to bring up Tesla for no reason. > As a third strike against the safety of white collar jobs at the moment, most companies have already more than fully recovered their number of white collar jobs from before the COVID-19 outbreak. The article from this point on is basically talking about the normal boom/bust cycle of business, even though the beginning of the article and Burry's tweet are talking about permanent decline. I'd say that this part of the article unintentionally makes the opposite argument it's trying to make. It is directly stating that blue collar job demand is worse, and white collar jobs recovered almost immediately. What is the actual structural reason why companies won't hire more white collar workers? You can't just spew out "automation" because the past 20 years or so has shown us the opposite trend in relation to automation. White collar workers are the foundation of automation companies. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/technology/coworking-spaces-wework.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/technology/coworking-spac...
- orsenthil 4y agoWhat is a white-collar job?
- mt_ 4y agoIf anyone has read "Bullshit Jobs", will know those jobs were created and why they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
- nemo44x 4y agoManagers will always find a reason to add headcount to their departments and orgs. Yeah we will probably see sone layoffs and modesty in things but eventually it gets sorted out and a new bull market takes hold and we are off to the races again. Impossible to see right now and it could be months or years. But it will all come back and we’ll make similar mistakes again.
- tshibley 4y agohttps://archive.ph/eqRpg https://archive.ph/eqRpg
- mavu 4y agoBuisness people can write as many opinion pieces as they want about it. I am never again giving up WFH.
- jonny_eh 4y agoBurry has a history of incorrectly predicting crashes [0]. You predict one crash correctly, and all you see are crashes. Then again… maybe we're in a very slow moving "crash" right now, and he predicted it 4 years ago? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/oawsxf/i_analyzed_last_15_years_of_news_articles_to_see/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/oawsxf/i_an...
- pedalpete 4y agoI like the saying "he's predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions".
- lamontcg 4y agoDoubt it. This recession is more about everyone else down to line cooks in restaurants being able to negotiate for higher salaries. I wouldn't really call it a "bubble" though more sort of "overdue wage adjustment" but the Fed is moving to crush it.
- tqi 4y agoI dunno, didn't he also say there was an imminent water crisis and that index funds were a bubble? Who knows, dude very well may be right in the long term but I don't think they panned out as investments. Ultimately, he may very well be right but I don't put much more weight into his opinion than any other prognosticator. I feel like the subprime bubble was uniquely suited to his expertise, but stuff like this requires both a deeper understanding of jobs and technology than he has, and is less of an inevitability.
- elevenoh 4y ago
- yobbo 4y agoThey took one tweet from Burry and expanded it into an article on their own, adding almost nothing that isn't filler. What he means exactly is still not known.
- not_enoch_wise 4y ago“Everyone else is overpaid but me”